In this week’s special documentary episode of the podcast, we explore the life and legend of Lee Harvey Oswald. Was he a poor, disgruntled loner or an overachieving marine? A presidential assassin or a sheep-dipped patsy? Find out in this week’s edition of The Corbett Report.

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Transcript and Sources

Lee Harvey Oswald. The truth about what happened with JFK begins where the myth of Lee Harvey Oswald ends. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. Go directly to jail…and die.

So who was Lee Harvey Oswald? Well, it depends who you want to believe. You can take him at face value or you can listen to the same people who sold you the Gulf of Tonkin, incubator babies and WMDs in Iraq, Jessica Lynch, and a million other lies.

Yes, that’s Dan Rather. Yes, the same Dan Rather who rose to prominence for his reporting on the ground in Dallas during those hectic few days surrounding the assassination of Kennedy, the capture of Oswald, Oswald’s own death. The same Dan Rather who, as one of the first and only people in the world to see the now-infamous Zapruder film before it was locked up by Skull & Bones / CIA asset Henry Luce’s Time/Life for 12 years and hidden away from the public, used that occasion to rush back to the studio so he could lie about it on air.

And that was the American public’s perception of the murder of their president for over a decade, until they actually had the chance to see it with their own eyes, presented courtesy of none other than Geraldo Rivera.

“Upsetting.” Is the word “upsetting” adequate to the task, Geraldo? Horrifying, perhaps. There, on live TV, the public witnessed not just the grisly death of the president, but with their own eyes they saw how an entire web of lies had been spun around JFK’s death by a spider more insidious than any arachnid. Not “forward with considerable violence” but “https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MLc0udf_74″ target=”_blank”>back and to the left.”

But why? Why the lie? Why the rush to capture, kill and posthumously indict this man: Lee Harvey Oswald? And if he wasn’t who they said he was, then who was he really?

In order to sort through any pile of manure, let alone one that has been piled high for 50 years, you have to get your hands dirty. So let us examine the manure that we are expected to swallow surrounding the official mythos of Oswald, the wizard of Dealey with his magic bullets.

So how can we unlock this myth? The keys to this story are all right in front of our face, if only we’ll recognize them.

A hero? Maybe not exactly. But the lone assassin of the president? Certainly not.

The term for it in intelligence circles is sheep-dipping. It’s when a military or intelligence asset is given a civilian cover to continue their work for the government in a way that can’t be traced back. It explains why Timothy McVeigh wrote letters to his sister claiming he had been selected for an elite Special Forces unit at Fort Bragg that participated in government-sanctioned assassinations and drug running shortly before “leaving” the service and beginning his transformation from ultra-successful Bronze Star Army hero into the monster of the Oklahoma City Bombing. It also explains how Lee Harvey Oswald, a dirt poor Marine Corps runt from Louisiana managed to learn fluent Russian, get discharged from the Marines, fly to Europe with money he didn’t have, stay at the most luxurious hotels along the way, and waltz into the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. It also explains why the U.S. Embassy loaned him the money to come back to the States after meeting and marrying his Russian wife, and even gave him a “military hop” home.

Oswald was a sheep-dipped asset, likely working for the CIA in the fake defector scheme they had to run spies into the Soviet Union in the 1950s. This program has been documented since the time of the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the 1970s, which uncovered the internal CIA documents confirming the program. JFK researcher Lisa Pease explains.

Oswald’s legend had been carefully established, a trail of cookie crumbs that led to the Soviet Union, and to the activities of some highly dubious pro-Castro Cuban groups. So all that was needed once the President had been lured into the killing grounds and the turkey shoot was over was to round up their man.

…But when we talk about Lee Harvey Oswald, the question has to be raised: do we know who we’re talking about? Are we even talking about one man?

Maybe it’s too late. Maybe we’ll never find the real Lee Harvey Oswald underneath the decades of manure that have been piled on top of his story. But there is one thing of which we can be certain: the rush to frame, capture, kill and convict in the court of public opinion this alleged disgruntled loner only makes sense as a distractionary measure. To keep the public focused on the how, instead of the real question. The transgressive question. The question that really matters: why?

50 years ago this month there was a coup d’etat in America. A coup that placed the shadow government of the National Security state—born in 1947 and already controlling more and more of the apparatus of government—firmly in the seat of power in America. It was a coup that occurred in broad daylight. Everyone saw it. And no one can speak its name. That is the ultimate coup.

Perhaps we will never know who Lee Harvey Oswald was, what he knew, whether in fact he was more a character than a man, a character with more than one actor. But in the final conclusion, we have no reason to doubt that he told the truth after all, there in the ominous hours before his death.